


coming home

by confinesofpersonalknowledge



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Deviates From Canon, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, How Do I Tag, Hurt/Comfort, Idk tagging is hard, M/M, Returning Home, This is literally soooo canon divergent, i wrote this like in season 2, okay anyway, this is so far from canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:02:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22995874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confinesofpersonalknowledge/pseuds/confinesofpersonalknowledge
Summary: Lance comes home after years at war, scars marking his face. He comes home with a stoic young man at his side, and years of scars and pain in his eyes. He comes home, but the boy that Lance once left is not the man who returned.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron), Lance & Lance's Family (Voltron), Lance & Lance's Mother (Voltron), Lance & Lance's Siblings (Voltron)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 157





	coming home

**Author's Note:**

> As one can probably see from the tags, this was written in like 2018 when season 2 was brand new. I just had a lot of feelings about Klance and Lance's family.

Lance comes home in the dark of the night, when the lights of his home world are gone and a storm rages in the skies above. He lands Blue in front of his house and stumbles out of his lion, vaguely registering Keith and Red landing with a whoomph next to him. Rain pours down on him, soaking his armour quickly, and he can’t help the sigh that escapes him. They’ve been on thousands of planets, felt hundreds of different rains, but nothing could compare to the rains of Earth. 

Keith appears to his side, and Lance can’t help but silently laugh at the incredulous look on his face. Keith may have lived in the desert, but nothing can compare to the downpours of Florida when hurricane season is just gearing up. Closing his eyes, Lance lets out a whoop in excitement, because he is home, for the first time in what he estimates must have been five years. 

When he opens his eyes, Keith is grinning at him and pointing at the house in front of him. The lights of the house have turned on, and when Lance raises his eyes to the second floor, he sees a pair of blue eyes peeking at him before the curtain closes to a flurry of hidden movement. He takes off at a run, but before he can even touch the locks of the gate, the front door is thrown open, and Lance sees his mother. 

It has been years since Lance has seen his mother, but he has never forgotten how beautiful his mother is. Behind her stands his father, and Lance cannot stop fumbling with the lock on the gate, he cannot get his hands to stop shaking so much that he cannot open the lock. But then a warm hand covers his own, and the flash of red and white armour covered fingers are opening the lock, and Lance is running to his parents, who are waiting for him, and he’s crying and his parents’ are crying and then Mariposa’s voice floats down from the stairs and there’s the sudden realization that Lance is home.

Lance has to make Keith explain, go over the fun adventures and skipping the ones that left them scarred for the worse. There’s an angry scar that runs from Lance’s left temple to the corner of his mouth, that twists his face every time he shifts. Keith is missing himself a leg, lost in a reckless move to save Shiro and Pidge years ago. But those things don’t matter to them anymore, not when the mission they set out with years ago was finally accomplished. 

They can’t stay for long, because while Lotor, Zarkon and Haggar might be gone, the Galra empire is too big, too far-spread for it to fall without a good leader. The Voltron Alliance needs them, the Paladins of Voltron, as much as it has always needed them.

The only difference now is that it is safe for them to go home. That Earth will no longer be the unwilling target of purple homicidal leaders hellbent on revenge. That Lance’s family won't be the victims of a war that their son helped start. That Lance won’t startle awake with nightmares of a weapon capable of breaking, shattering planets with nothing left to salvage of them. That they will never lose Earth.

They get a dog before they leave. 

It’s not something either of them had set out to do when they returned to Earth. A pet was the furthest thing from their minds, but she was there, one day, alone in the rain. Keith had watched, from the side, as Lance had run over to the small puppy, covering her in the jacket and simply marching her up to Keith and demanding they keep her.

With the happy spark in Lance’s eyes, Keith couldn’t find it in himself to deny Lance. They name her Purple (because Lance has Blue and Keith has Red, but the two of them together make purple and because Keith is undeniably a huge, giant sap).

Blue and Red are simultaneously amused and affronted. Blue especially likes to claim that if she and Red hadn’t done what they had done, Lance and Keith would still pine away at each other and drive the rest of the Castle’s inhabitants up the walls. 

Lance is different, when he returns. There’s a sharpness to him, an anger and a sadness in him that is unfathomable to his family. He still laughs (silently, because Lance lost his voice in the years he has been away) with his family, still cooks with his sisters and still does facemasks at night with his siblings. But he’s different.

When Veronica accidentally drops a glass dish, the shattering sound has Lance moving, a knife pulled easily into his hand. When Alejandro, Lance and their uncles go shooting, Lance is easily the best of them all, a sniper rifle nestled easily onto his shoulders, or two handguns easily gripped by long, calloused fingers that he uses to draw a flower made of bullet holes. War rests in his eyes, his shoulders, his back, in the scars of wounds that never faded. There’s an unsettling ease in the way the weight of a rifle sits on his shoulders, an unfound grace in his movements that his professional-ballerina of a sister cannot match. 

Where Lance goes, Keith follows. Keith himself is a quiet man, who has a scowl attached to his face and at least two knives on his person at all times. For the longest time, Alejandro thinks that Keith chooses not to speak, that Keith is the reason that Lance lost his voice and gained the glint in his eyes, but Lance pulls him to the side one day and explains, slowly, painfully, writing everything he wants to say out because there was no one who knew the sign language Lance used. Explains that Keith lost his leg and gained a lifetime of nightmares on a mission to save Lance, that Keith loved, loves, Lance more than anything Keith has loved in his life. Alejandro doesn’t mutter about Keith anymore after that. 

Keith and Lance are in love. It is a fact, as plain and simple as saying “the Galra are all evil.” That is, it really isn't that simple because things like that can never really be simple. Keith and Lance love each other, and they do not know they love each other. 

It's in the little things, the small moments they share.

The surge of jealousy Keith always feels when Lance flirts. The feeling Lance claims is admiration when he watches Keith train. The trust the two of them have to always have each other’s backs in a fight, even if they're on opposite sides of the room. To an outsider, looking in, it is easy to see the love the red and blue paladins have for each other. 

But for Keith and Lance, it is not so simple. Because Keith, hilariously awkward, does not know how to articulate his feelings and Lance, quietly insecure, does not want to overstep his boundaries. So they dance around each other, both denying themselves; neither moving forward. 

It comes out on a mission of all things. Because Lotor is not his father, not obsessed with the Black Lion, and far more cunning. His generals are handpicked for their intelligence and their prowess in battle and out of the field, not just agents of brute strength that are easy to fight. 

One of them, the almost-chameleon-like one, captures Lance. And Keith? Keith cannot stop remembering how it happened, cannot stop thinking of the last words Lance whispered to him over the comms, the goodbye that left Keith reeling in his spot, cannot stop thinking of the scream that echoed in the halls of the warship.

Lance lost his voice that day.

Keith lost his leg.

They wouldn’t get Keith’s leg back and Lance laughs hysterically (but so, so quietly, without the happiness, the waves, the music in his voice) when he found out he lost his voice, but they would move on. But they would never be the same again. 

Let’s talk about a Lance, who stumbles out a cryopod with a happy smile on his face and a greeting on his lips. Let’s talk about a Lance who doesn’t remember, quite then, the scar that cuts across his throat and what he had stolen from him. Let’s talk about the smile that slips off of his face, the way he keeps trying, keeps trying to get a word, something, anything out.

Let’s talk about a Keith, who falls out of his cryopod into the waiting hands of a crying Lance, who can’t walk on his own anymore but always has Lance. Let’s talk about a Keith, who has always been fast on his feet, who has always been the fastest of them all, falling behind in races because the prosthetic where his leg should be aches.

Let’s talk about a Lance and a Keith who have lost something, everything, and nothing at all. 

Darkness seeps in from the corners of his eyes. He’s waiting, sniper rifle resting on the curve of his shoulder, keeping an eye out for the flash of brightly-coloured armour. He’s their guard, their failsafe in every case of an emergency, and a position like that calls for hyperfocus. It’s why he doesn’t hear her footsteps, doesn’t recognize her presence until she’s hovering over him, arm in his chest and a breathless scream ripped from his throat.

Lance jerks back into awareness under the breeze of a cool Floridian night. An echo of the scream catches in his throat, never making it past the ugly lump of scarred skin that serves as a reminder of all they had lost. Violetta keens at the foot of their bed, her head raised to watch him even as he swings himself out of bed and to the open window, arms curling around him in a poor imitation of a hug. 

Unfamiliar stars twinkle down at him, lost constellations of his lost home as foreign to him now as any other star cluster. Restlessness chews at his awareness, a need to get outside, to do something other than idly sit and wait for the next threat, the next attack to sneak up on him. 

There is only one instance Lance can remember where someone had been able to sneak up on him, had been able to catch him off-guard enough. But once had been enough, and he’d paid the price for his carelessness over and over again. 

Florida is a restless state - even late at night, he can hear the sounds of a delighted child’s shrieks as they play some game or another. The more he stands at the window, the more certain Lance becomes that he wants to descend the stairs of his home and go running, just to feel the rush of cool air in his hair. He can’t move. 

He’s frozen in place until Keith comes up behind him, sleep tugging at the corner of his eyes. Concern furrows his brows, the night sky twinkles in his eyes. He is beautiful, an unending reservoir of love and affection meant just for Lance. Lance does not deserve him. A hand comes up to Lance’s face, a thumb brushing away tears Lance hadn’t known were on his face. 

There’s something sad in Keith’s eyes, a quiet sort of grief for the things they have both gone through. They’d never asked for this, never asked for the world to collapse around their ears as they struggled to keep each other afloat. Never asked to see each other in unimaginable pain, day after day for weeks until it was all they could do to even breathe for each other. 

Lance can remember the debilitating fear every time they came for him, for Keith. He remembered time that seemed to stretch on forever, curling his fingers into Keith’s hair and humming the old lullabies of his youth. 

This was something his family would never understand - the echoes of pain in their bones, the instinctive fear of a woman’s high cackle. Lance leans forward until his face is buried into Keith’s shoulder, and sobs.

This was not something they had asked for.

They don’t notice it, at first. They’re engrossed deep in a conversation, both so accustomed to sign language that they don’t notice the speed they’re signing. Messages can get mixed at high speeds when you’re still learning sign, which Keith learned after accidentally offending the High Priestess of Nazca by signing the phrase “your robes should catch on fire” instead of “your knives look really cool.” 

It’s when Lance’s sister incredulously demands as to what kind of conversation they’re having in the morning that Keith realizes they had an audience - one that had very clearly misinterpreted his conversation with Lance about one of their missions. Whatever they’d understand, it clearly wasn’t very nice. 

Lance takes in their expressions and laughs a little. Brushing a kiss to Keith’s cheek, he signs “you have to explain,” and leaves the room for Keith to face the wrath of Rosa and Mariposa McClain.

Sometimes Keith wonders why he loves his boyfriend so much. Then he notices the cup of coffee, steaming hot and ready for him to drink, and lets the fond smile he’d been holding back out. 

Rosa can remember the all-encompassing fear curling in her gut when the doorbell rang - the dread building even as she carefully greeted the Garrison officer. She can remember the solid presence of her husband next to her, carefully placing a supporting arm around her shoulder even as the officer spoke words of condolences, faltering under the weight of her sobs. She can remember the sound of screaming and the quiet voice of her oldest son whispering his brother’s name. She couldn’t believe it then. 

The next years were some of her worst. She had never lost a child before, and this was her youngest, the most beloved of the family. Everyday was a struggle to make David come home, to make Leandro and Veronica get along without the buffer of Lance’s good humour. When he’d left for the Garrison, her son had never tried to distance himself from his family - he’d always invited them to family events, had whispered Skype conversations with his siblings until obscene hours of the night, that he thought she never knew about. Even when he was away from home, he had never truly left them.

Not like that night. 

It was Allita that brought them altogether, in the end. She dragged home her eldest siblings, David and Esme, had brought together what was left of the youngest (Mariposa and Leandro, the twins). She became was Lance was not there to be anymore - the centerpiece of a broken family. It was never the same without Lance; he was always a gaping absence in their ranks, a missing chess piece that made winning the game impossible. 

When he came back, he didn’t quite fit. He was too different, just as they were changed from the years they had spent without him. His hands sometimes moved too fast for them to understand what he was saying; it rankled that they sometimes had to rely on his silent companion to understand what Lance wanted to say. They had jokes, they had years of experiences that were something Lance could never understand.

He hadn’t been around for the birth of David’s first son, named after Lance. He hadn’t been around when Esme had broken down into tears at her wedding, unwilling to get married without her whole family present. He hadn’t been there for the twins’ joining high school, the years where Mariposa was too afraid to get close to anyone else because what if they left her like Lance did? He wasn’t there for Leandro’s first boyfriend, his first heartbreak. 

It wasn’t fair to him. It wasn’t, and Rosa can see the hurt on his face when they make jokes he cannot understand, but there is nothing Rosa can do.

The truth of the matter is this: 

Lance had left. For five years. And it changed everything.

Not every moment is bad. Not everyone is consumed by their nightmares, not every night is a pattern of a cold awakening from dreams unacknowledged. There are happy moments too. 

Like when Lance stumbles in from the hunting trip with his father and brothers and finds a warm cup of tea waiting for him. Or when Keith wakes up from a dream he can’t remember and Lance is waiting for him with patient smiles and fond eyes. Not every moment is bad. 

There are fond smiles shared, family dinners with too much to fit on the table. There are happy memories made, old memories revisited. Stories are shared to the embarrassment of some and the laughter of others, but everything goes well. There are rough patches, wounds that will leave scars that will never fade, but they do not last. 

Because this is a family, this is what makes a family. It’s years of separation and a moment of reunion healing old wounds. It’s impatience and lost tempers, and it’s tears and broken hearts. It’s Lance’s family, willing to accept them for them - the scars and wounds and memories. 

Not every moment has to be bad. 

Not to say that there aren’t bad moments. For every good, there is the bad - the memories of an abandoned family (however unintentional), the memories of war reaching the shores of a world long-protected. 

It’s easy to give into the bad memories, the years of bitterness and the unhappiness, the endless nights of waiting, of arguments, of tears. It’s easy to give into old habits, a knife slipped into a hand at a loud sound, the dismissal of pain that can easily overwhelm others.

No one means to do it. But it’s easy.

Lance’s first argument with his family happens with Allita. They’re fighting over something dumb, something trivial, but then she brings up the empty years and it becomes another argument, another issue that was ignored and shoved away until it boiled into clarity on it’s own.

It hadn’t been that long since Lance lost his voice. Maybe under a few deca-phoebes, but it’s easy for Lance to forget that there’s something he’s missing, something that was so important and so necessary. Haggar had known that, had known that Lance was the diplomat for the planets that were hesitant to support the Voltron Alliance - he had a natural way with words, an easy charm that made trusting him sound as easy as breathing. Lance treasured his position, his slot into a scarily-efficient team. 

Maybe that was why Haggar took out his voice. 

See, it hadn’t been that long since Lance lost his voice. It’s easy for Lance to wake up in the morning, to attempt to sing-song his boyfriend awake only to realize with a sort of sunken defeat exactly what it meant to lose something so vitally a part of yourself. In the midst of battles, he would try and scream out warnings to his friends. At home, with Allita, Lance forgets. He forgets, and he opens his mouth to try and yell, holler, scream something at her. But nothing comes out. And he remembers. 

Allita has never felt more guilty before. The look on his face, the utter destruction even as he whirls away from her and stalked towards the front door. The grief and anger that wars in his eyes even as the door slams shut, and a blur of dark hair and burning violet eyes pushing past her. Keith. 

She’s frozen, an unwilling witness to the shaking of her brother’s shoulders, the unsteady motions of hands trying to explain what he no longer could express. To the gentle care with which Keith hugs her brother, the soothing hand in his hair even as anger burns in his eyes, eerie in the moonlight. To the fury and grief and understanding that root her to her spot when Keith meets her eyes.

She turns away.

Everything is fine, in the way that nothing ever is fine. Everything is fine because they say it is fine, repeat it to themselves over and over again lest they unravel.

It’s fine. Lance doesn’t wake up in the night, screams cut off before they could begin.

It’s fine. Lance doesn’t have to hover awkwardly around Keith in the mornings because Keith might have forgotten to put on his leg.

It’s fine. Lance’s family is the same as before, if not with a few additions.

It’s fine. 

It’s fine, until it isn’t. No facade can hide the truth, no matter how carefully constructed. There is no denial of what must eventually be acknowledged. Everyone remembers the half-choked screams of “he had nothing to do with this!” echoing around the house, and everyone remembers forcefully, cheerfully, ignoring them. The shouts of a half-finished fight, the mornings where the kitchen was full, too full, or the smell of cookies wafted through the house at an ungodly hour of the night.

It’s fine, even when it isn’t. 

Everything’s fine. 

It starts with a war, bursting into action after years of silent fighting. It starts with five humans, forced into a battle they never looked for. It starts. 

We all know the middle, and dear readers, I would not wish to retell that tale once more. It seems that once is enough, a lifetime of pain and suffering and sacrifices made for the sanctity of all of us. It seems unnecessary to tell a story over and over again until the truth is so distorted that we can no longer distinguish it from reality. So, readers, I will not go over the middle. After all, we all know it. 

It’s the end that matters, either way readers. It’s why you’re here, reading this. It’s why I’m here, to tell you this. Because we want an ending, a satisfactory close to a story well-wrought with pain. And readers, this is the most difficult thing of all. Because such endings are not truly possible.

You have seen the end of this story, expressed in as many ways as I can think to tell. You have heard the end, the pain and the happiness at the end of a story. And I can only hope you can come to understand that this is how this story must end - everything settled, but not bad. Not good either. Because this is reality, readers. 

I want to tell you this though.

Two years after the war is over, Keith proposes to Lance. He does it on a beach, in the rain. He does it with Lance’s family around him, a silent support in what will become his family. He does it knowing Lance’s answer, knowing the ring that Lance hides on a necklace until they can get married in front of his family.

(And that, readers, is another story of it’s own). 

They are married quickly. Lance’s family cries during the ceremony, mourning for the Lance they lost and happy for the Lance they gained. Alejandro won’t stop yelling about Lance’s crush on Keith from way back in the Garrison. (What Keith doesn’t know is that Shiro has the same number of stories, if not more, of Keith’s awkward crush on Lance). 

David goes on to have another song, one he names after the man that brought his brother home. When Keith first meets him, he cannot stop crying tears of joy. Lance has to excuse himself from his room, signing shakily to his father that “he had never seen Keith so happy.” 

Esme gets married soon after Lance comes home. Her long-time fiance teases Lance to hell for keeping her waiting, but accepts the war-ridden heroes into her family as easily as breathing. They adopt a daughter together, and name Lance and Keith as godparents.

Allita gets a job at the Garrison. She spends her years making sure that no other family has to go through what her family did. Leandro and Mariposa graduate high school with two war veterans in the crowd, pride shining on their faces.

Readers, I bring you now to what you have been waiting for.

Lance and Keith get a small cabin by the sea. They spend their lives there, with Red and Blue and Violetta. They wish for a child, but the one they have, a rescued half-Galra baby from an abandoned base, is more than enough. They leave Earth when they are called on missions. They raise their daughter. 

They do not die separately. They die together, peaceful in their old age. And they laugh when their souls meet each other once more. 

~finis~


End file.
